Faye Dunaway is a complicated woman. That’s what the actress’s reputation is all about. Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown And several other films. Fay It is a portrait of a Hollywood legend, and more specifically of the New Hollywood, now 83 years old, directed by the French-American director Laurent Bouzereau, with her full consent. This vision of the difficult artist is dealt with for an hour and a half. You never escape it. We see the icon Bette Davis in it. Talk show From Johnny Carson to claiming Dunaway was the worst person in Hollywood, the HBO documentary, which premieres Sunday on the streaming service, flow Max explores different justifications – “I’m still responsible for my actions,” he says – though. There are, for example, the late diagnosis of bipolar disorder, the depression, the total dedication to work and the rigor with which he does everything. But also, as James Gray, who directed him in 2000, asked: In the networks of corruption (Squares), would it be such a big deal if Dunaway were a man?
The documentary opens with a “Are you filming?” prompt, in the actress’s New York apartment, on March 29, 2021. As she sits on the couch—“the worst seat in the world,” she later says—the director shows a famous photo she took. Terry O’Neillwhom Dunaway later married, exactly 45 years ago. At dawn, the morning after she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Scandal on TV (network( , by Sidney Lumet, sitting on a chair by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel, with newspapers covering the event—and the posthumous award for Peter Finch, who had died months earlier—spread all around. Next to her was a table with newspapers, the statuette, and a tray of breakfast drinks. It was a series of photographs under the theme, “Is this all there is?”
Then we see some of the “talking heads” that will be part of the film to introduce the actress. It starts with Mark Harris, a journalist and author of Five Cam Backwhose series Bouzereau adapted, or the autobiography of Mike Nichols, Sharon Stone, actress and friend of Dunaway, British journalist Robin Morgan, friend and cataloger of Terry O’Neill’s work, actor Mickey Rourke, who starred alongside the film. The protagonist in Barfly – marginal loveby Barbet Schroeder, and her son Liam Dunaway O’Neill, who talks about how his mother keeps her feelings inside and then lets them out when she acts out, and then later looks at old photos with her, or Annette Insdorf, a college film professor. And there are more people later, like actresses Mara Hubbell, who has little to say about working with Dunaway, who plays Joan Crawford in the film. my dear the mom (My mom DearR), by Frank Perry, and Rotania Alda, the assistant director turned producer Hawk Coach, or the journalist and critic Julie Salamon, and the director Jerry Schatzberg, whom she left for Marcello Mastroianni (“I always say, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to lose someone, whether it’s for Marcello Mastroianni,” he says), among others. There are also archival photos of people who have disappeared or are not easily accessible, as well as old interviews with her and others.
Regarding Dunaway’s reputation, Morgan explains that adjectives like “volatile, difficult, temperamental” are true, but they must be followed by “meticulous, very attentive, with an eye and temperament for detail.” He continues, “You have to look deeper into the artist.” Bouzereau tells us how careful she is about how she is photographed and all the preparations that are required to be in front of the camera. “It’s the job, it takes everything it takes,” he justifies. Sometimes, there are details that go wrong and you become “nervous and frantic,” there is tension. It’s not easy, he tells us.
The film explores the origins of Dunaway, who was born Dorothy Faye Dunaway on January 14, 1941 in Florida. The actress highlights the difference between Faye Dunaway, a a personality“someone I probably created,” as she describes him, and Dorothy Fay, “the girl from the South” who wasn’t “a long time ago.” Yet she claims he is still “a deep part” of her.
The documentary doesn’t explore this idea much, though it does return to it at the end. It goes through her beginnings in theater with Elia Kazan, her arrival in Hollywood, her transformation into a fashion icon, and, for her, the 1970s—a “gold mine”—where some of her most important films were made, and the ups and downs—and many of the latter—in the decades that followed, and the transition to television, production, and roles that dried up as the years progressed.
